I always thought it was Oscar Wilde who said ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ but it turns out I was wrong. It’s something I’ve misremembered. So much for the benefits of being older and allegedly being more knowledgeable! It was actually the great Irish dramatist and author George Bernard Shaw who famously said it. He later went even further remarking about young people of his day saying that, “they’re brainless, and don’t know what they have; they squander every opportunity of being young, on being young.”
What brought me to be considering Shaw’s statement was a alignment of the stars, so to speak. I had just read the words of Socrates in Plato’s The Republic where he says to Cephalus (who is described as a ‘very old man’), ‘I enjoy talking to very old men for they have gone before us, as it were, on a road that we too may have to tread, and it seems to me that we should find out from them what it is like and whether it is rough and difficult or broad and easy’. Sound words idea I exclaimed! ‘Youth’, I thought, ‘Listen to us old men’. If indeed 57 (for it is my age!) is old.
This event occurred alongside another. I was out walking the dog on a fine sunny morning, my disposition wholly positive, and I saw walking towards me a young man of maybe 18 years or so. And as I walked towards him I pondered (being a little flexible with the maths) that I am about as close to the end of my life as he is to the start of his. And with Socrates’ words ringing in my ears I contemplated what sage words I could give him about the condition of the path - rough and difficult or broad and easy. I thought I’d tell him not to waste minutes, hours, days, months, hell years, in trivial and frivolous pursuits. I would look him in the eye and implore him not to make the same mistake I felt I made and waste large swathes of his life.
I sometimes do a particular exercise with people when I deliver my well-being courses. I give them a handout of a ninety year life in weeks. Essentially it is 90 rows of 52 small boxes and you draw a line through all of the weeks you have already had. It is quite a sobering exercise making people realise that, assuming they are lucky enough to have ninety years, how much of their life has already gone. And then I show them mine because I am usually the oldest person in the room. I make the point that I feel I have more I want to do with the bit I’ve got left than the bit that I’ve had. I point out the reality though that I may spend some of those years I have left not being quite as able to do as much as I used to. It always hits home and is a great reflective exercise.
As i pondered all of this, having passed the young man, and having decided not to say, ‘hey you! What are you doing with your life!’ I had the realisation that what seems a waste when you are young and what seems a waste when you are old are probably entirely different things. I wouldn’t have thought of things that I now think were a waste of my time and energy as a waste at the time. The point is that in order to look back on your life and think about what was a waste (in your opinion) you have to be 57 (or at least oldish). It is only through older eyes that we see what was folly and what was not, but at the time of the ‘doing’ we had no idea whether the thing we were doing would pay dividends ….or not. So, it would be no good to say to the young man don’t waste your minutes, hours, and so on because what he sees as worthy at 18 and what I see as worthy at 57 are probably two different things. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that to offer advice as an older person to a younger person is, in fact, the ultimate folly of old age. They won’t listen and nor should they! I mean if they want to that’s fine but I suspect there is more mileage in having them ask questions that they feel are important rather than me telling them things that I think should be important to them. After all they live in a very different world at 18 than I lived in when I was 18.
So is youth wasted on the young? Absolutely not. Be young and do things that later on you might consider foolish or not worthy. I mean… be safe still…. but you get my point! If you don’t do such things how will you ever know what you should be doing and not doing. We all have to make our own mistakes and figure a way through them. Adults (and parents - who are adults I guess - sometimes!) just need to be there when their opinion is sought but not to offer it before it is sought. I need to get better at this.
The thing with young people is they have loads of energy. They are full of creative enthusiasm. They are resilient and adaptive. I love to see and hear young people challenging the norms of the society we live in. I might not always agree with them but I find young people are really good at getting me to think. They are, or should be, full of optimism and hope - well as long as we (the old ones) don’t corrupt the planet and society any more than we already have - my generation have a lot to answer for. Their willingness to take risks and push the boundaries of the status quo should be encouraged. They must try things out that later on they might well think were a waste of time. But they must try things…. and we must get out of their way so they can live the lives they want to live.